2014-03-07 20:16:27

by Phillip Susi

Subject: chattr: operation not supported ( on symlinks )

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It seems that symlinks return -ENOTSUP for lsattr, causing chattr -R
to spew errors. Why don't symlinks support attributes, and if not,
shouldn't chattr know this and suppress operating on symlinks instead
of spewing errors?

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2014-03-08 15:30:00

by Theodore Ts'o

Subject: Re: chattr: operation not supported ( on symlinks )

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 03:16:24PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote:
> It seems that symlinks return -ENOTSUP for lsattr, causing chattr -R
> to spew errors. Why don't symlinks support attributes, and if not,
> shouldn't chattr know this and suppress operating on symlinks instead
> of spewing errors?

The VFS layer doesn't pass ioctl's down to the file system layer for
symlinks. Thinking about this, arguably the right answer is to allow
chattr to function on symlinks, since it cloud be useful to make
symlinks immutable.

- Ted